Well, weird/sad part is that my emotional reaction in the dream to losing one of these dreams? Was more intense than my emotional reaction to losing the contract @ the place I was contracting that I'd been thinking 'this shit's going south soon', and that is now currently en route to Antarctica.

Heck, I'm pretty much daydreaming of a boring, dead-end job. It'd be something I could succeed at by just phoning in the minimum amount of effort, and then I could leave it at the office when I went home for the day. I'm surprisingly okay with that, at this point.

I came here partly to ask if you meant "dreaming" like Martin Luther King, Junior's dream, or nighttime/asleep dreams. Your response to scanner_darkly has made that clear, but for me, it's the other kind of dreams.

However, your in-dream reaction suggests you're in a different psychological place right now.